Elizabeth kept her face slack to hide her surprise. “Who is he?”
“He’s the crazy little bastard who framed me for murder.” Balacontano let go of his mop and let the handle topple to the floor, then sat on the bed. Elizabeth watched the discarded glasses bounce once on the tight blanket; Balacontano noticed them too, and went through the ritual of putting them back on. “You want to close out your file on him. I want to close out my file on him too. But not just yet. First he’s got to give me my life back.
“Ten years ago, I made a mistake. I was an important man, capo di tutti capos. I had a lot on my mind in those days. You probably think it’s like the movies: an old guy with a face like a prune and a shiny suit sits behind a table in a room so dark you can’t hardly see him and sends big zombies out to machine-gun a mom-and-pop grocery store because they didn’t pay their nut that week.”
Looking at Balacontano, Elizabeth decided this was probably accurate. All the old man needed was the suit.
“Well,” said Bala, “it’s not. It’s like any other business. It’s the shifting of capital to where it’s going to do the most good. At the time I came here, at least ninety-five percent of my business was perfectly legal. I had interests in corporations, T-bills, oil leases, franchises, bonds, real estate, stocks. That’s what made the money. Why do you think the people who really own this country put their money in those things? Because they’ve got no balls? Let me tell you, if Citibank or Salomon Brothers thought they could make more money stealing cars, you wouldn’t be able to get a ride from here to the bathroom. Once in a while, when things got rough, I’d cut a corner.”
“Was that your mistake?” asked Elizabeth. She couldn’t believe it. Carlo Balacontano was talking to the Justice Department. “Cutting corners?”
Bala’s left eyebrow formed an arc. “Please, don’t make me think you’re stupid now.”
Elizabeth had allowed herself to get too excited to think clearly. She had to concentrate on what he said and keep him talking. “How did this man fit in? Did he work for you?”
Balacontano thought about it, then shook his head. “Even the people who worked for me weren’t like that—employees with a lunch bucket. But he was something else. He was a specialist. One day, with no warning, I suddenly developed a tax problem, and I want you to know I wasn’t the only one. Some of the biggest corporations in the country developed the same problem on the same day.”
As Bala remembered it, he could still feel the shock and outrage as though he were hearing it for the first time instead of telling it. A United States senator who had been obsessed with the unfairness of the income-tax laws for twenty years had begun to assemble a list of profitable corporations. They were doing nothing illegal, which was why they made such an effective set of public examples. All they were doing was plowing profits back into the business on capital improvements, acquisitions, new markets, new equipment. But in the computer search the senator’s staff had uncovered, along with the corporate giants, a company called FGE. They had left it on the preliminary list because it sounded big. The G and E might have stood for “Gas and Electric.”
But FGE had been a low, dirty beige building beside a shopping mall on the edge of Las Vegas. Half the building consisted of rented post-office boxes, and the rest was devoted to a small office with secondhand furniture and paneling on the walls that looked like wood but wasn’t. In it a man named Arthur Fieldston did business as Fieldston Growth Enterprises. His entire trade consisted of receiving large amounts of cash from the quiet men Carl Bala sent to him and paying it out to accounts that Carl Bala designated, as payment for imaginary investments and services.
The day Carl Bala learned that FGE was about to become famous, he had experienced a shock that felt as though he had taken a sucker punch from a small, weak opponent. He summoned Harry Orloff, the fat, disreputable lawyer who had invented FGE, to his farm in Saratoga, and ordered him to dismantle his invention. Orloff had whined that it would take weeks, and in the meantime Arthur Fieldston, the last remaining member of a well-known western landowning family, would receive a subpoena to testify before the Senate Finance Committee. At that moment, Carlo Balacontano had experienced a fit of something he would later describe to himself as “mad caution.” He had exaggerated the importance of the problem in his own mind. Then he had told Harry Orloff it was worth his life to be sure Fieldston didn’t testify.
To Elizabeth he said, “My attorney, Harry Orloff, decides that he needs time to get the papers in order. He tells himself the only way is to get to the senator who’s causing the problem. That was Senator Claremont of Colorado.”
Elizabeth was listening to something she had waited ten years to hear. It was what had brought her into the case. At first everyone had thought the senator had committed suicide, but then the lab people had discovered that the poison had been in the glass he’d used to soak his false teeth.
But Carlo Balacontano was still talking. “I didn’t know what Orloff was doing to take care of things until it was too late. I’m sitting in a restaurant in New York one night, a nice family place owned by the son of a friend of mine, and I get the word. This United States senator didn’t die in his sleep in Colorado. Or he did, but the reason he happened to do that was that Harry Orloff had managed to hire a specialist to come in and do him. I’m shocked. I’m knocked on my ass. I’m furious. On the one hand, the hearings are held off, and Arthur Fieldston is hiding so he can’t be dragged in to answer questions. On the other, my little tax problem with Arthur Fieldston is nothing compared to assassinating a fucking senator. I figure my only hope is that the rest of the world is going to look at the list of corporations getting subpoenas and figure that one of the oil companies or the car companies had decided that they might save a couple billion dollars by not answering too many questions. The problem is that when a big public figure dies, everybody in the country with a badge, gun or law degree, or even a typewriter, comes out to beat the bushes.
“And that’s where I made my second mistake. I’m sitting there at the table in the restaurant, and there’s a candle burning on the table. My man tells me that Harry Orloff needs two hundred thousand dollars to pay off the specialist, because he’s done his job and he’s just shown up in Las Vegas to collect. I’m already so pissed off I can barely see. I’m looking at my guy, and it’s like his face is at the end of a red tunnel. My head is pounding, and I notice I’m breathing so hard that the candle flame is flapping like a flag. When I hear the part about the two hundred thousand and the specialist showing up and registering at Caesars, I go absolutely berserk. I tell the people at the table with me that I want out of this. I want it to be like it never happened. And that was it.”
“What do you mean?” asked Elizabeth. “That was what?”
Balacontano shrugged. “That’s what put me in here. What I’m guilty of is understating my income to the IRS. I figure two years is enough time on that, so I ought to be out six years ago.”
Elizabeth’s face showed no expression. “Except they tell me you weren’t convicted of tax evasion.”
Balacontano waved his hand in frustration. “You’ve got to understand what we’re talking about here. I don’t know how to make you see it. There’s a lot of talk about hit men and all that, so it sounds like going to an exterminator or something. What people don’t think about is that getting somebody killed isn’t all that hard. I saw a couple of days ago in the paper that some woman in Phoenix hired two teenagers to strangle her husband for a hundred bucks apiece. With competition like that, how does anybody make a living? I’ll tell you how. There are only maybe five or six genuine specialists that I know about, so there can’t be more than two dozen, tops. And they’re an odd bunch. You hear about movie stars and famous heart surgeons and these morons with the guitars, and somebody says they’re prima donnas. They don’t know what the hell a prima donna is.